What is the difference between a symbol and an idea?
Last week I received two excellent questions about symbols. “Aren’t all ideas symbols?” And “who gets to say what reality is?” I knew it would take more than a Facebook response to give the questions their due.
Let me start by saying that others may wish to use the same words differently. My hope is not that you will use the same words I use, or even agree with my attempt to say how they are different, but simply that you will see the complexity of the subject.
First let’s look at the difference between ideas and words:
If I see a rabbit and take a mental snap shot of it, and you do the same thing, we each have an idea we are both calling “rabbit” even though our actual ideas may be different. In addition, there is something out there hopping around outside either of our ideas.
Next let’s look at the difference between words and signs
A stop sign has a word on it, but the message it conveys is equally clear with a red light. A sign can point at something, or imply a message.
Finally difference between signs or ideas and symbols
A watch looks like a sign but there is an important difference. A watch with hands isn’t a snapshot of something else, it is an analog of something we can’t see, namely the movement of the earth relative to the sun. It is a coded image that puts us in relationship to something else which is very real but hard to talk about. If the watch is broken, or simply not set to the right time, it is still called a watch but its purpose is missing. In the same way, religious ideas that do not reveal anything outside themselves may be said to be broken.
Religious symbols are more like watches than a signs. Their purpose is not historical or scientific. They don’t just point, they decode. Their purpose is to give us mental or sensual images of our fundamental connections to the things we cannot really make into pictures- things like being and time. This can be done through stories that bring to awareness our intuitive sense of connectedness. There is a distinction we need to make between analogs to a particular time and analogues to time itself and between analogues to any particular beings, and to being itself.
Religious symbols, if they are healthy, aren’t just ideas we make up. They are a kind of code that mediates between our consciousness and the mysterious reality which lies all around us. Sane religion isn’t trying to say WHAT the mystery is. Sane religion just remembers THAT the mystery is.
This is a very difficult question to answer, and one that I feel causes even more questions to arise. Part of the reason being, there is no general, broad scoping answer to give, it really must be broken down into parts. You did an awesome job of that here, Jim. I very much appreciate your take, and the analogy to watches rather than signs, feels a far better fit for me.
The problem I see is that people associate the term “religion” to the different and far reaching pictures in their own minds. Much like your rabbit. We all have our own picture of what the word religion is. Some see it purely as belief/faith, others as the ceremonies around that Faith, and yet others as solely a pathway to some great, omnipotent being in the sky, ect…. And as such answering the question of ” is religion made up” becomes nearly impossible to answer. So, depending upon an individuals’ personal understanding of the term, Religion could be made up or not.
I think that before that question could be truly answered religion would need to be viewed, imagined and understood universally the same, which would be impossible, as we are each on our own path to understanding our place in religion and in humanity.
Tracy,
Boy, that is a problem. When we say “God is One” there are two ways to hear that. We can say our sect’s view is the only one, or we can say that we are all part of one unity beyond any of us. The first understanding is fundamentalist, the second is mysticism or universalism. The way out of the catch twenty two you describe so well is for all of us to broaden and deepen our particular understanding until we have a sense that all our religions are actually calling us to the common life.
Jim
Well said, Jim. If I re-cap (and please forgive the simplicity/brevity): ideas reflect our individual concepts, words reflect the commonality of those concepts (we both understand a common thing when we say ‘rabbit’), signs send a message or point, symbols provide conscious/unconscious connections to concepts.
I guess I would say that symbols are what help us account for relativism, really. I know we’ve talked about this before: the cross evokes something different for me than it does for you. What I’m taking from what you’ve said above is that it’s value is referential, in that it brings forth the ‘sacred,’ no matter the individual interpretation.
Here’s my trouble: you’re saying that sane religion brings mystery to the fore but isn’t prescriptive. If that is the case, why be Christian? Why be Buddhist? If the answer is to commune with other people around a known set of symbols, then, to me, that becomes in fact tied to history, context, time. Maybe it’s just the great mystery … how to make the holy/sacred manifest in our lives in practical, meaningful ways.
Thanks for exploring this. It’s immensely interesting and helpful.
I think you said it better than I did. We are trying to “tune” our historical existence to our cosmic essence. We are calibrating our human lives to the “tree of life” for want of a better image. A child sitting on the parent’s lap does not understand the parent, but he or she has trust that makes life bearable. The trust isn’t that things will happen as we want, but that reality is our home. That is what we are trying to do with religion in my opinion. Not to understand the world, just to have a trust and reverence for our ground of being. Of course there are a thousand other ways to view things, this is just mine.
Your interpretation of the cross is as valid as mine. Whether one sees the cross as referring, in my case, to the suffering necessary to love, or, in your case, as a symbol of violence the point is not to leave the reality of pain out of our world view.
Hard ball questions are much more helpful to me than polite ones,as I try to put all this into words. So, thank you so much for your honesty.